In the December 30, 2003 issue of PC Magazine, they review several blogging tools (congratulations to Six Apart for the Editor’s Choice!), and talk about RSS and popular aggregators, including FeedDemon, SharpReader, and NewsGator. From the article:

RSS is even poised to change the business world. […] According to Greg Reinacker, the founder of NewsGator, programmers at at least one software company are using his aggregator to notify one another whenever they make changes to their communal code base.

Joe Gregorio has a good post about MIME types and the feed: scheme:

There has been much talk today, and in the far past, of how to automatically handle syndication subscription. The conversation was first brought up and thoroughly discussed by Greg Reinacker. The issue has resurfaced on the [atom-syntax] mailing list. Now there are a small contingent of folks pushing for a new uri scheme called ‘feed:’ that would enable syndication subscription. Creating a new URI scheme is a bad idea, don’t do it. [BitWorking]

There’s more to his post; click through and read it.

I had a long response typed out, and it’s been sitting in my Drafts folder for a day now. I deleted it; I just have two short comments now:

First: many folks don’t have sufficient access to their web server to change MIME types. Not a problem for say, Blogger and TypePad, but it is indeed a problem for, say, some Radio and DasBlog users.

Second: As Joe mentions, using MIME types will require adding some kind of link tag to the feed, and he proposes exactly this for Atom feeds. But that doesn’t help for all of the existing RSS feeds in the wild today…and adding a tag to all RSS feeds is problematic (spec is frozen so we can’t require the tag, and adoption rates for an optional tag will be dismal).

It’s all about adoption rates – for something to be useful to the average user, it needs to be pretty pervasive. Both of the above issues fly in the face of quick adoption.

More reading here, here, here, and here. And lots of other places I’ve missed, probably. :-)

I’m pleased to announce that I will be participating in a teleseminar called “Blogging for Business“, where we’ll be discussing, believe it or not, blogging and RSS in business scenarios. Debbie Weil (author of the WordBiz Report) is putting it together, and Dave Taylor (of Teach Yourself Unix in 24 Hours and Solaris 9 for Dummies fame) will be participating as well.

I can’t remember the last time I was accused of being a “business guy”, so this should be fun! I encourage you to check it out if you have an hour to spare on November 20th.

Disclaimer – I have no financial interest in this seminar – I just think it’s a great idea!

Yet again, the code I posted to generate RSS feeds from Visual SourceSafe has expired…I’ve posted a new version that will work until February 28, 2004.

More info (and instructions) here and here.

UPDATED: expiration date extended through October 31, 2004 – download the updated version from the links below.

Download: msi | zip

Going to the PDC? Look me up! You can send email to pdc2003 at rassoc.com to catch me immediately…try to keep it short, as it will be forwarded via SMS.

I will also be at the Weblogger BOF session, of course, on Monday night. See you there!

Hmm…this phone comes with both a mono headset and a stereo headset. Which teased me into thinking that the phone, plus a large SD card, would make an awesome MP3 player. However, using the stereo headset, the sound quality leaves something to be desired. There’s pretty much no bass response whatsoever.

So now I’m wondering if it’s the phone, or the headset. It’s got a pretty small plug (2mm maybe?), and of course my normal headphones don’t have this side of plug.

Any ideas? Or has anyone else tried this, and could report what they found?